diary fragment f. pessoa

DIARY FRAGMENT

the book of disquiet

As if the sun above me breaks through the clouds, I look at my former life, and I notice with metaphysical amazement that my most sure behaviour, my most lucid ideas and my clearest plans were ultimately not more than innate drunkenness, inborn lunacy, great ignorance. I haven’t even been acting. I was acted. I was not the actor but his play. […] It is hard to describe what you experience, when you feel that you really exist, that the soul is a real entity, and that I do not know with which human words I should refer to it. I do not know whether I have a fever – that is what I feel – or whether I just got rid of the fever, the fever to be a sleeper of life. Yes, I repeat, I am like a traveller who suddenly nds himself in a strange city without knowing how he got there, and I must think of those who lose their memory and are someone else for a long time. For a long time – since my birth and consciousness – I have been someone else, and now I wake up on the middle of the bridge, spanning the river, and I know that I am more real than I have been until now. However, the city is unfamiliar to me, the streets are new to me and there is no medicine for my illness. Leaning on the bridge railing, I therefore wait until the truth pulls me away and I become insigni cant and unreal, intelligent and natural again.

It was only a moment that has already passed. I see the furniture that surrounds me again, the pattern of the old wallpaper, the sunlight through the dusty windows. For one moment, I have seen the truth. For one moment, I was aware of what the grown-ups are for their whole life. I remember their deeds and their words and wonder if they were not tempted by the devil of the reality more successfully. Not knowing yourself is living. Knowing yourself poorly is thinking. Seeing your true self in a ash, as in this purifying moment, is suddenly being aware of the inner monad, of the magical word ‘soul’. However, this unexpected light singes everything and consumes everything. Strip yourself of your self. […]

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 21-02-‘30